Emilia Bassano Character Analysis
Overview
Emilia Bassano is the historical heart of Jodi Picoult’s dual‑narrative novel. In Picoult’s imagining, she is not merely the first Englishwoman to publish a book of original poetry (the 1611 Salve Deus Rex Judæorum) but also the true intelligence behind the plays credited to William Shakespeare. The novel presents her as a converso Jew, the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, and a woman whose enormous literary ambition was systematically erased by Elizabethan patriarchy. Her story unfolds in counterpoint to Melina Green’s modern‑day fight for authorship, making Emilia the symbolic foremother of every silenced woman writer.
Plot Role and Narrative Function
Emilia’s timeline runs from 1581 to 1645, forming the novel’s historical strand. She is the candidate for the “true author” that Melina researches and eventually dramatises in her play. Within the 16th‑century chapters, Emilia’s life becomes a clandestine writer’s journey: she pens poems, sonnets, and full‑length plays, but to see them staged she must funnel the work through William Shakespeare, a jobbing actor who serves as her front. Her plot arc illustrates the mechanics of literary suppression—how a woman’s genius could be bought cheap, her name removed from title pages, and her identity reduced to a footnote.
Motivations and Core Traits
From childhood, Emilia experiences the world as a place that refuses to listen to her. Her greatest motivation is not fame but utterance: the drive to put words to what she feels and thinks. At twelve she populates a faerie house with the chess pieces of a king, queen, and pawn, and in her imagined story the orphan is loved so fiercely “that it will tear the whole world apart.” That longing for a voice of her own never leaves her. In private she writes “hundreds of pages” of poetry, fables, and dialogue, storing them under her mattress. She observes, “Men believed that women were meant to exist on the fringes of their lives, instead of being the main characters in their own stories. But why would God have given her a voice if it wasn’t meant to be used?”
Her traits emerge through action. She recites bold verse at Wilton House to a room full of male poets, holding her own against Ben Jonson. She rages when she discovers Shakespeare has republished her sonnets without her permission, calling him “that rat bastard.” She leverages her intimate knowledge of the Danish court to write Hamlet, scripts Portia’s “Queen o’er myself” speech while scrubbing laundry with raw hands, and refuses to be entirely broken by an abusive husband. Emilia is sharp, proud, and ferociously intelligent, yet she is also strategic: she learns when to hide and when to push.
Chronological Arc
A girl passed around (1581–1582). Twelve‑year‑old Emilia is a ward of the Countess of Kent. Overhearing that neither the Countess nor her brother the Baron Willoughby wishes to take her further, she builds a faerie house and re‑stories herself as the pawn that both king and queen fight to keep. Soon she is taken on a violent sea voyage to Denmark, where Queen Sophie tells her “the body’s blood is power” and she watches a court play unaware that the names Rosenkrans and Guldensteren will later surface in her own tragedy.
Mistress and secret poet (1582–1588). After a masque where she aids a young earl (Southampton), she meets Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s cousin. Trained by the courtesan Isabella, she becomes Hunsdon’s mistress. He treats her kindly but it is a transaction: her body for security. She begins writing in earnest—poems and scenes that critique the voiceless women she sees on stage. A visit to the Rose Theatre crystallises her ambition: watching a dull Shakespeare play she thinks, “I could write better.”
The Wilton House salon and a forbidden affair (1588–1592). At Mary Sidney Herbert’s country estate, Emilia meets Spenser, Drayton, and Jonson. Mary shares her own closet drama written with disappearing ink, and Emilia realises a woman might leave a literary legacy. She begins a secret relationship with the teenage Earl of Southampton, rediscovers desire, and drafts Venus and Adonis. With Kit Marlowe—her first true literary peer—she writes Arden of Faversham. When a pamphlet insults playwrights, Marlowe pushes her to write a play that reframes a murderess as a woman grasping for freedom.
The front and the fall (1592–1594). Emilia hands the Arden manuscript to the actor Shakespeare for a fee. Plague closes the theatres; Hunsdon discovers she is pregnant and abandons her. Her cousin forces her to marry the spendthrift Alphonso Lanier. She births a son, Henry, but Alphonso beats her and squanders her settlement. Marlowe’s death plunges her into depression until a dream of him jolts her back to work. She supplies The Rape of Lucrece to Shakespeare and revises Titus Andronicus, adding characters named Æmelius and Bassanius as her secret signature.
Writing through the worst (1594–1618). Rekindling her affair with Southampton leads to a pregnancy she cannot keep. She transmutes that grief into Romeo and Juliet. When Alphonso returns from France and rapes her, she writes The Merchant of Venice, pouring her own marginalisation into Shylock’s “pound of flesh” and Portia’s courtroom authority. After her infant daughter Odyllia dies, she creates Ophelia. Othello becomes a coded message for the imprisoned Southampton. She keeps selling plays to Shakespeare, who treats her as his “golden goose” but refuses to raise her pay. Desperate, she self‑publishes Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, but it brings no patronage.
Last acts and a sustaining light (1618–1645). Following Shakespeare’s death, Emilia runs a girls’ school, teaching Latin and French to daughters of immigrants. When a rent dispute lands her in debtor’s prison, Ben Jonson gives her the foul papers of Othello to revise for the cryptic First Folio. Her son Henry dies suddenly; she raises his children. In old age she sues for unpaid hay‑patent money, and Southampton—now an earl—intervenes, acknowledging he “always knew” she wrote for Shakespeare. Emilia dies of a fever, experiencing a vision in which Kit Marlowe assures her that her words will outlast everything. The novel’s closing symbol is a supernova: a brilliant, dying star whose light travels long after its source is gone.
Key Relationships
- Lord Hunsdon: Her protector and de facto owner. He offers intellectual companionship but ultimately treats her as disposable. His review of plays for the Lord Chamberlain exposes Emilia to the theatre, inadvertently arming her.
- The Earl of Southampton: Emilia’s great love. He is younger, kind, and the dedicatee of her long poems. Their affair provides emotional respite, the loss of a pregnancy, and years of coded communication through art.
- Kit Marlowe: The only person who sees her as an equal. He drinks, fights, and writes furiously; his death leaves her creatively bereft until she realises she can give her pain to a character.
- William Shakespeare: A mercenary transaction. He is her front, her paymaster, and the thief of her sonnets. Emilia despises him yet relies on him to get her plays onto the stage.
- Alphonso Lanier: The brutal instrument of her subjugation. He squanders her money, beats her, and rapes her. Her decision to stay with him is solely to keep Henry safe.
- Mary Sidney Herbert: A mirror of what Emilia might become. Mary translates, writes, and gathers artists. Her disappearing‑ink trick becomes a metaphor for Emilia’s entire career.
- Henry (son): The reason Emilia endures. Every compromise, every hidden manuscript, is meant to secure a future for him.
Key Decisions and Consequences
Using Shakespeare as a front. With Marlowe’s encouragement, Emilia pays Shakespeare to present her work as his own. The decision gets her plays performed and earns money, but it also ensures she will never be named. She becomes a ghost in her own canon.
Marrying Alphonso. Forced by her cousin, she accepts a marriage that brings physical and emotional violence. This choice—framed as survival—traps her in poverty and silences her public ambitions for decades.
Publishing Salve Deus openly. By putting her real name on a book, Emilia briefly steps out of the shadows. It does not rescue her financially, but it is the first time she claims authorship. That small act of self‑assertion prefigures Melina’s final walk onto the stage.
Revising Othello for the First Folio. Years after Shakespeare’s death, she silently restores her own words to the play, embedding them in the volume that will forever bear his name. The decision guarantees her lines endure—even if her identity does not.
Theme and Symbol Connections
Emilia is the living expression of the novel’s central theme: female erasure and pseudonymous authorship. Her name is stripped from title pages, her sonnets are resold without consent, and her genius is funnelled through a man who “could not write a decent line.” The gender bias in the arts is shown in every patronising remark she endures and in the impossibility of a woman entering a printer’s shop without a chaperone. Her writing becomes art as resistance: the laundress who scripts Portia’s plea for autonomy; the battered wife who gives Shylock his defiant humanity. Her body itself is a commodity—first traded, then beaten—mirroring the commodification of women explored across both timelines.
Picoult plants potent symbols. The faerie house Emilia builds as a child is a miniature world she alone controls, much like the plays she will later construct. The pawn chess piece represents her constant repositioning by more powerful players, yet she learns to move strategically in the game. Mary Sidney’s disappearing ink literalises the self‑erasure demanded of women writers. And the supernova that closes her story—a dying star that blazes brightest—stands for Emilia herself: unrecognised in her time, but still travelling through centuries of literature.
Five Book-Specific Questions and Answers
1. Does Emilia Bassano actually write Shakespeare’s plays in the novel?
Yes. The novel posits that Emilia is the primary author of many works attributed to Shakespeare, including Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale, among others. She writes them privately and then sells the manuscripts to the actor William Shakespeare, who presents them publicly as his own.
2. How does the novel depict her relationship with the Earl of Southampton?
Southampton is portrayed as Emilia’s true love—a relationship that begins when she is around twenty and he is a teenager. Their affair is passionate but clandestine, and it inspires several sonnets. In the novel, Southampton is the father of a child she aborts, and he later learns that she is the hand behind the plays he has admired. At the end of her life, he quietly acknowledges her authorship.
3. What is the significance of her Jewish heritage in the story?
Emilia comes from a family of converso Jews who perform as court musicians. Her heritage makes her an outsider at court, and she must hide her identity while drawing on it to create Shylock’s famous monologue in The Merchant of Venice. The threat of exposure—exemplified by Dr. Lopez’s execution—keeps her constantly on guard and reinforces the theme of hidden selves.
4. Why does she agree to marry Alphonso Lanier?
After Lord Hunsdon abandons her during her pregnancy, her cousin Jeronimo brokers a marriage to the destitute Alphonso in exchange for a £700 settlement. Emilia has no viable alternative and submits to the arrangement to protect her unborn child. The marriage becomes a source of abuse, but she endures it because leaving would mean losing Henry.
5. What happens to Emilia at the end of the novel?
Emilia dies of a fever in 1645 at age seventy-six. Before her death, she has run a school for girls, survived debtor’s prison, and revised Othello for the First Folio. She dies with the certainty that her words have been secretly woven into the plays that will live forever, and the closing imagery—a supernova’s light—suggests her legacy endures even if her name does not.
For a full breakdown of the novel’s resolution across both timelines, see By Any Other Name Ending Explained. For broader exploration of the ideas Emilia embodies, visit our pages on female erasure and pseudonymous authorship, gender bias in the arts, and the Shakespeare authorship question.